El Dorado had pretty good reviews on BGG I thought. As with all things nerd, opinions are all over the place. But there seemed to be mostly good praise, and for every perfect 10 review with no text, there seemed to be a review giving it a 1 because Ďthe rule book suckedí.

Think Iíll take the plunge on so long my world because Iím a sucker. Want me to order an extra playmat for you Schild?

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

The next CMON is on KS... Cthulhu based. $100 for the game (so far) or $250 if you want the 2 foot tall Cthulhu mini.

If you managed to catch one of the giant Cthulu pledges, that is. At least for now they're all spoken for. In fact, it was a real shitshow as the Kickstarter opened with 250 of those available at a $220 price point and they were grabbed within about five seconds. Then every five minutes they added another 100-200 pledges but increased the price by $5 each time all the way up to $250 and stopped there.

Wish I'd have gotten one just to flip it on eBay after this is all over.

I'm pretty Cthulud and Zombicided out, but I'll get this. Even if it doesn't get to the table I can easily reuse the miniatures for rpgs, which makes it a pretty great value.

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can." - Ernest Hemingway

So far I have backed Rising Sun and Blood War from CMON. My experience has been entirely positive. I'm backing this one as well.

Even if they sell 5K of the giant Cthulhu, I'm betting they'll sell for well over $150 in the secondary market in 2025. I'm not a huge fan of the sculpt, but am still waffling on whether I will get it. I'm waiting for the end of the KS to see what else is added to it.

Daviau isn't much of a selling point for me at this point. While I love the legacy mechanic, it didn't make Risk into an interesting game, and Seafall was pretty bad as well (my current thinking is that it just flat out doesn't work for competitive games, but that's another rant). And while I appreciate Betrayal at House on the Hill, it's a beer and pretzels game, and one that frequently just degenerates into scenarios where players sit around in the room with the MacGuffin rolling dice until they accumulate enough successes to win. I've had some good times with BaHotH, but I've had more bad times with it.

As for Death may Die specifically, let's see. I'm pissed off about all the other things everyone is pissed off about regarding how they're running the campaign and that idiotic "miniature", but I'll try to ignore that. Mostly, it just feels like a vanilla CMON game following the Zombicide/Massive Darkness/The Others/World of Smog etc. formula and using probably the most overused theme in gaming at the moment. It feels like a joyless cash grab. It's not so much that something is bothering me about the mechanics, it's mostly that I just don't feel anything about those mechanics at all. I've seen them hundreds of times before. Maaaybe the modularity could be kind of neat, but that's not really about how the game plays. I don't care if I'm facing some unique combo of old one x and scenario y when I'm just moving around and rolling successes in any of the possible combinations.

I don't know. A month ago, I probably would have backed it, even feeling as meh about it as I do, but I was recently joking with someone that I've stopped measuring my game collection in "shelves" and started measuring it in "rooms", and then I stopped and thought about that for a while, and realized how sad that is, so I'm trying to set a higher bar for new acquisitions, and this doesn't even come close to reaching it.

It looks like it will appeal in the same way as Betrayal at House on the Hill with mechanics that seem pretty straight forward. For what it is intended to do, it seems solid.

Not sure if you edited to add this in or I just didn't notice it, but yeah, I completely agree with this. If you want more BaHotH without a traitor mechanic and love miniatures, this is probably a no brainer. You know the mechanics work because they've been used a billion times before. If you somehow don't already have a dice chucker of this ilk and want one, or just desperately want a 20th Cthulhu themed game, it's probably a great purchase.

CMON runs a great Kickstarter business if you like the products. If you don't, it's all just useless knickknacks and piles of garbage.

They do not make good games.

Have you played Blood Rage? Because I felt that one was excellent, and everybody Iíve played it with has agreed.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

Competitve legacy games can work, but they need to not give players competitive advantages for winning a round. You need to either just evolve the game and keep all players balanced, or give the winner a reasonable disadvantage in the next game(s).

Goldmean - all your points are fair - but as you note, the stuff bugging you isn't really about mechanics. I don't have too many Cthulhu games right now - I just have Deep Madness on the way (which is somewhat similar, but more modern).

As a second note: Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is hittng Kickstarter, too. Here.

Competitve legacy games can work, but they need to not give players competitive advantages for winning a round. You need to either just evolve the game and keep all players balanced, or give the winner a reasonable disadvantage in the next game(s).

Yeah, that's great in theory. No one has yet made one (and I've played them all, not that there are that many). The feedback is only one problem. It's easy to solve that, but Charterstone for example doesn't really have a big "The rich get richer" feedback loop problem, but we're close to the end of the campaign and it's become a slog for us for another reason. The whole nature of the changing rules and board mean that some games are just out of kilter balancewise. In a cooperative game that's not a problem because it's just a new puzzle to overcome, and provides some fun narrative. In a competitive game it just doesn't feel good. We've had several games where someone just happened to have a good board position for that game. They got a lot of essentially free points and didn't really feel good about it, and we felt even worse. A lot of that is probably Charterstone specific in that it doesn't feel very well balanced, and in addition to evolving rules also has special rules for each game, but just by the nature of combinatorics, balancing a legacy game is reaaaaallly hard unless you make the permutations incredibly bland. It's not an insoluble problem, but it is a hard one.

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Goldmean - all your points are fair - but as you note, the stuff bugging you isn't really about mechanics. I don't have too many Cthulhu games right now - I just have Deep Madness on the way (which is somewhat similar, but more modern).

Well, I'm also being polite. I happen to think that dice resolved combat and skill checks are dull as dirt, but that's a personal taste thing. They're fine for RPGs, but just terribly bland for boardgames, which I generally play for interesting mechanics. Despite this being the internet, the lowest I'm willing to go is to say that it looks uninteresting, has an overly used theme (albeit one I like), and a terribly run kickstarter that has actively pissed off a lot of their fan base. Unlike most people though, I happen to believe in the nature of subjective experience, so I don't usually lead with "That's a terrible game and you should feel bad for liking it"

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As a second note: Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is hittng Kickstarter, too. Here.

Speaking of weirdly run campaigns... If you don't have the first edition, you should probably pick this up, but as someone who does, I'm not really seeing why I should care about it. The rules tweaks are fairly minimal. They don't include the non-promo expansions, and despite their blurb about "new content", this is essentially 150$ for some ancient miniatures and a small handful of new tiles and chits. I might end up backing under the hopes that years down the line they'll actually catch up with where first edition is and start releasing some new content for it, and it would annoy me to not have the kickstarter exclusive stuff then, but I won't feel good about it.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

That CMON mini is one of the worst interpretations of Cthulhu I've ever seen. As for games with a Lovecraftian feel, I'm pretty happy with Shadows of Brimstone. We've never finished a game of Arkham Horror, but we've played SoB dozens of times.

This seems like a weird stance in such an auteur driven industry like board gaming, especially when designers often have their games published by different companies. I mean, I get it if it's a moral stance for some reason, or if that company reliably produces shoddy components, and I get the logic of going "Well, this company produces mainly crap, so I'm not going to pay much attention to their upcoming products" (and this is certainly the case with CMON), but choosing to nix a game multiple people are recommending just because of the company that footed the bill for its production seems... odd.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

This seems like a weird stance in such an auteur driven industry like board gaming, especially when designers often have their games published by different companies. I mean, I get it if it's a moral stance for some reason, or if that company reliably produces shoddy components, and I get the logic of going "Well, this company produces mainly crap, so I'm not going to pay much attention to their upcoming products" (and this is certainly the case with CMON), but choosing to nix a game multiple people are recommending just because of the company that footed the bill for its production seems... odd.

You do you, though.

Fantasy flight is garbage also.

So is Richard Garfield.

People bad at things sometimes pump out something good. How is this a weird stance.

I haven't played the game teleku mentioned, maybe it's good, but when a company produces typically bad shit, I'm not gonna be around to find out.

1.) No KS Exclusives.2.) You're likely to get it cheaper soon after the KS are delivered if you buy from stores.3.) It is similar enough to the first version that you're better off playing the original with the expansions than buying this slightly better version (perhaps) of just the core game with no expansions available.

As it is that game claims to be 4x but it always just ends up being he/she who has best fleet wins. We keep bringing it out over the years thinking that there is more depth that we are somehow missing, but nope. Build the best fleet and go shitstomp your opponents and get the galactic core. Meh

They both have a few games that get very high reviews from a broad spectrum of gamers. If you turn down their products based entirely upon their rep with no evaluation as to whether the game itself is any good, you might miss out on a good game... and be stuck buying one of the other dozen or so good games being released these days instead.